Anyone who has spent time in a hospital recently knows how concerned health professionals are about spreading diseases they increasingly can’t control.

Notices are everywhere urging hand washing for workers and visitors. Chemical disinfection stations are outside every room and in every hallway. Or should be.

Increasingly, modern medicine is having trouble controlling drug-resistant viruses and bacteria that are adapting and surviving the drugs we dose them with.

Enter a little firm, now based in Dover, called Healthy Environment Innovations, or HEI.

Keep this on your radar because one day its technology could be one of our saviors – literally. It also may become a major employer unless its owners decide to sell.

Started several years ago by New Durham engineer Ed Neister, HEI has come up with a new way to deal with the problem using a special wavelength of the ultraviolet light spectrum to bust apart bad microorganism’s DNA.

When I visited Ed in his garage/workshop some years ago he had just developed the lamp that could emit this germ-busting light. I’m not an engineer, but it doesn’t take one to understand the potential if his claims of its effectiveness are true.

Others also have been smitten by the concept. There’s been at least one small round of investor funding for the company.

Over time HEI has passed repeated tests that have shown its far-UV application indeed kills nasties on the surface of anything it shines on. In a faction of a second and more efficiently than existing technology, as a matter of fact.

It takes more than a good idea, however, to market a new technology – especially to the medical market.

The cost and time required to test HEI’s Germbuster for use on human skin, as in hand cleaning and wound disinfection, has been a setback. Ed and his brother John are convinced it will happen but could be some time away.

Meanwhile, the Neisters have sold the HVAC and food industries on their technology and sales are just beginning.

Soon milk bottles scrubbed clean with far-UV light might allow longer shelf life for this and other products. HEI light wands could become common to clean the air in every nursing home air conditioning unit.

This requires the firm to be able to produce a significant number of Germbuster lamps and that’s where you, the public, come in.

HEI is not a typical company, if there is such as thing, and it is trying a new method to raise the next infusion of cash so it can produce more lamps and grow.

It has turned to a website and social media platform to appeal to the public for funds.

Indiegogo.com helps entrepreneurs fund growth with capital raised from small investors. If you like what a firm is doing you can sign up to send it money, or to buy something the firm makes. In HEI’s case, go to www.indiegogo.com/GermBuster to read all about it.

The Neisters are doing this because they are convinced Germbuster lamps can save lives.

Their indiegogo campaign lets anyone just send them money to support the effort. But the focus is on selling homes and businesses an HEI unit that will clean the air in a building’s heating or air conditioning ductwork in addition to raising capital.

It started out with a goal of $1 million generated by selling 1,500 air units. About a month into the effort, response has been lackluster and the Neisters have scaled back the goal to $250,000 and between 300-400 units sold.

Even if you don’t think you need super clean air in your home, you can embrace what HEI is doing by sending the firm $10 or $25 and take satisfaction in helping fight a medical plague.

If you find yourself in the hospital one day, you may not have to worry as much about being infected with something that will eat you up while doctors look on helplessly.

I won’t go so far as to say that one day HEI’s far-UV technology could equal pasteurization or that the firm could become another Merck. Odds are its technology will be embraced into many firm’s products and its inventor will fad into successful obscurity.

But don’t forget you read about it here and it was created in our neighborhood.